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AN 



ORATION 



BEFORE THE 



CITY AUTHORITIES OF BOSTON, 



FOURTH OF JULY, 1871. 



By HORACE BINNEY SARGENT. 








BOSTON 


. 




ROCKWELL 


& 


CHURCHILL, 


CITY 


PRINTERS, 


122 


Washington S 


T REE T 








187 1. 













AN 



ORATION 



BEFORE THE 



CITY AUTHORITIES OF BOSTON, 



FOIJETH OF JULY, 1871. 



By HORACE BINNEY SARGENT. 




BOSTON: 

ROCKWELL & CHURCHILL, CITY PRINTERS; 

122 Washington Street. 

18 7 1. 



1x71 






CITY OF BOSTON". 



In Common Council, July 6, 1871. 

Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council are clue, 
and they are hereby tendered, to General Horace Binney 
Sargent, for the very able and eloquent address delivered 
by him before the City Government and citizens of Boston, 
on the occasion of the ninety-fifth anniversary of the 
Declaration of American Independence ; and that he be 
requested to furnish a copy of the address for publication 
by the City. 

Sent up for concurrence. 

MATTHIAS RICH, President. 



In Board of Aldermen, July 10, 1871. 

Concurred. 

CHARLES E. JENKINS, Chairman. 



Approved July 11, 1871. 

WILLIAM GASTON, Mayor 



ORATION. 

The earliest dawn to-day recalled those words of 
Milton's Agonistcs, — 

"The morning trumpets festival proclaimed 
In eacli high street." 

This is the chief national festival, yet commemo- 
rated, as John Adams thought it should be for ever- 
more, "by solemn acts of devotion to Almighty 
God," and with w pomp, parade, guns, bells, bonfires, 
nad illuminations, from one end of this continent to 
the other." 

Ninety-five years of anxious triumph — the agony 
of glory — have passed away! Why is it that this 
excitable people, not fettered by too much reverence 
for the old, and eminently fond of new sensations, 
still watch, with unabated, hereditary enthusiasm, 
the rising of this day's sun ? "Why is it not dimmed 
to them by the distance of near a hundred annual 
journeys through illimitable space ? Why do not 
the vast and near events, that the last decade has 
swept into our history, make us regard the Revo- 
lution as the day of small things ? 



6 JULY 4, 1871. 

The men of this generation have been actors in 
successful war, on a scale of military grandeur that 
our fathers never knew. Within ten years one sheet 
of paper has enfranchised twice as many millions as 
were they who broke the British chain by seven years 
of war. Younger victors, lately robed in garments 
dyed with Freedom's imperial purple from their 
veins, who tendered their lives in battles to 
which Princeton and Monmouth were only skirmish 
fire, are here to-day. Some of the empty sleeves 
before me were won by the side of cannon that 
blazed in miles of battery, on ridges higher than the 
lowest clouds that touch the monument on Bunker 
Hill. Even the surrender of Cornwallis is a quiet 
landscape picture set in the dreamy mist of ninety 
years, compared with the lurid panorama of your 
embattled hosts that so lately and so grimly girt 
with walls of fire a far more wretched and more 
gallant chieftain. 

Yet, while the very actors in these recent scenes 
frequently forget their dates, most Americans re- 
member the Second, and all, the Fourth of July, 
1776, — the immortal days when the decision and 
the Declaration were made. Why is this long and 
loyal memory of the nation's heart ? Why would 
treason, if committed to-day, shock us like the 
profaning of an altar? 



OEATION. 7 

The answer is plain. Our victory in the war of 
the rebellion was one of the manifestations of estab- 
lished power. But the day which we celebrate 
marks the birth and enthronement of that power 
as a new force in our history. To-day is the birth- 
day of a sovereign, — a living, reigning, and immor- 
tal sovereign, — the people; the only monarch who 
need never subsidize an army, but who is sure — 
until we establish female suffrage — of a musket and 
a man behind each snow-flake of imperial will. And 
this sovereign is so allied, by the presence of the 
people all over the continent, by a general knowl- 
edge, which, being the knowledge of everybody, 
is greater than the knowledge of anybody, and 
by millions of consentient power, to the infinite 
attributes of the King of kings, — omnipresence, 
omniscience, and omnipotence, — that the voice of 
the people has been wisely and reverently called 
the voice of God, who is a spirit, and in whose 
spiritual image men are made. To-day is the- 
birthday of this godlike power — The Peoj)le. ]STo 
wonder that The People does not forget it ! 

The field of history which we enter again to-day 
has been gleaned for a century. But because the 
price of Liberty is eternal vigilance, the harvest of 
history — its lesson — is forever new. 

What is this sovereign people? It is not near the 



8 JULY 4, 1871. 

battered Tuileries, or in the draft riots of New 
York, that we may seek the infant king, around 
whose cradle, a century ago, our wise men, Wash- 
ington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, assembled. 
The cradle was both a camp and throne; for 
The People was born from the brain and heart of 
God, all diademed for empire, and helmeted for 
war. 

To establish this new sovereign power, Franklin 
brought all his keen insight into the weakness and 
strength of human nature; Hamilton, his proud, 
dauntless courage, and the philosophy of a more 
than human intellect; Adams, his force of resistance, 
his vast powers, and volcanic fire under pressure; 
Jefferson, that matchless felicity in seizing and 
expressing the grand ideas of the people, which 
makes some of his simplest sentences thrill us like 
the trumpet tones of the "Marseillaise" and the 
" Star Spangled Banner " shouted in chorus by ten 
thousand men; Washington, a divinity of judgment, 
a nobility of virtue, and a modesty of valor, which 
consecrate him as the soldierly incarnation of civic 
immortality. 

The devoted supporters of a sovereign give some 
indication of his qualities. At least we may gather, 
from the character of his most loyal adherents who 
place him on the throne, some idea of him, as he 



ORATION. 9 

seemed to them. The solemn consecration, the dar- 
ing enthusiasm, the unwavering faith, the lofty 
bearing of the fathers had nothing of the mere 
iconoclast. They meant something more than the 
substitution of one ill-regulated monarch for another. 
Washington did not brave the halter of a traitor for 
any /dishonest, unhoused, unwashed usurper. In 
the most boisterous enthusiasm of John Adams 
there is nothing of the demagogue. The memorable 
conclave of July, when the decision to separate for- 
ever from all the dear traditions of the great mother- 
land was made, breathes a triumphant, sad solemnity, 
which reminds one of a Roman picture, — now 
probably destroyed by a French mob calling itself 
the people, — where jubilant archangels, not un- 
prescient of Calvary, and with the glory of the 
throne upon their robes and faces, gather their 
overshadowing, illuminating wings around a new- 
born God in Bethlehem. 

If our celebration of this birthday of the people 
is anything more than lip service, it is worth while 
to inquire what sort of a ruler these men of the 
educated, powerful class, and fresh from allegiance 
to a monarchy, intended to support; that they were 
so ready to fall on their faces and adore? From 
what sceptre of human government does the lustre 
come, which can excite John Adams, at forty-one 



10 JULY i, 1871. 

years of age, the " Atlas of Independence," " The 
Colossus of Debate," to break forth in this ex- 
uberant strain: "You will think me transported 
with enthusiasm, but I am not;" "through all the 
gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and 
glory"? 

Few popular phrases have been more misapplied 
than this specious statement, that "government 
rests on the consent of the governed." If it mean 
that government owes its quiescence to the un- 
willingness of its subjects to attempt escape from 
present evils by flying to those which are unknown, 
it is as applicable to an empire as to a republic. 
But if it mean that the governed must be unanimous 
in supporting the most vigorous legislation before 
such legislation can be rightly enforced, and Vir- 
tually with the consent of the governed, unless they 
choose to commit themselves boldly to the sacred 
and inalienable right of revolution eo nomine, — 
government is not worth the devotion of the meanest 
rebel soldier, whose unburied skeleton is knocked 
about by the herds of half-wild swine now roaming 
over that Virginian "Wilderness, which the priceless 
blood of your most beloved sons, poured out in the 
name of government, has drenched. 

Government implies command, and the right and 
the power to crush out resistance. The strongest 



ORATION. 11 

government on earth is one where the majority 
of armed citizens make and choose to enforce its 
laws. Unless mobs, and associations of violent 
strikers comprise the majority of the armed citizens, 
mob law ought to be more out of its proper element 
here than under an Eastern monarch, whose 
despotism can be tempered by a single assassina- 
tion. It is the vigor which wields the law more 
than the weight behind it that deters offenders. 
If the people were alive to the truth that indi- 
vidual freedom cannot exist with a feeble execution 
of the laws, mob law, exercised against the will of 
the voting, arm-bearing majority, would be im- 
possible. But two conditions are essential to this 
effective majority: one is that the voting, arm- 
bearing majority shall be vigilant and do the duty 
of citizens; the other is that such a republican 
virtue and equality of condition shall be maintained 
as to secure this majority on the side of conserva- 
tive interests against a destructive, ill-conditioned 
minority. 

Washington intended to enthrone irresistible 
jpower resting on the will of enlightened armed ma- 
jorities. The fathers worshipped no waxen statue 
with a tinsel sceptre. The will of the people was to 
be vigorously supreme on its vast quarter-deck. 
Freedom meant Law. 



12 JULY 4, 1871. 

The theocracy, which the Pilgrims purposed to 
establish, — though, perhaps, a dream for centuries 
to come, — is a pure, popular government, combining 
the virtues of all forms of government, wisdom, 
purity, energy, and weight. As in the physical 
world, the highest organism passes, in its develop- 
ment, through the stages of resemblance to the infe- 
rior organisms which have preceded it, so the various 
inadequate forms of society — aristocracy, oligarchy, 
and monarchy — seem to be but progressive steps to 
that exalted social state, in which the great mass of 
the people, imbued with the wisdom of the few, and 
•the virtue of the best, shall act with the absolute 
energy of one. 

On this birthday of the Republic, we may, per- 
haps, be permitted to exult a little. It was an 
inspiring belief of Socrates that the heroes and mar- 
tyrs and sages of all time, still, in the spirit, push on 
their earthly work and stimulate the minds of men. 
Who would be sorry to believe that the soldiers and 
statesmen of the new-born nation may rejoice to-day 
with a mighty people which stretches nearly from the 
Arctic Circle to the Caribbean Sea, and fronts two 
thousand leagues on oceans which join, through us, 
the centuries of Europe to the cycles of Cathay, that 
we have swept the " ephemeral blot " from " an im- 
mortal instrument " ? If Franklin can recall his 



ORATION. 13 

earthly memories of "Wedderburae, may not the phi- 
losopher feel a little quiet satisfaction at the spectacle 
of a most exalted British Commission, sitting in the 
capital of aggrieved America, to review, and author- 
ized to express regret for a fatal British wrong ? 
Might not a soldier hope that the great Revolutionary 
Chief may stretch his broad hand in benediction over 
the living, and greet dear brethren dead with some- 
thing of the tone which thrilled the weeping Spartan 
mother on the evening of Thermopylae, — 

"Your son doth sup with Leonidas to-night"? 

By celebrating this day we seem to approve the 
act of our fathers, and to renew our allegiance to 
that majestic power which they expected their sons 
to defend against all usurpers from above and from 
below. 

The garnered glory and the triumphs ripe justify 
exultation. But we should be less wise than the 
Egyptians, who tried their monarchs dead, if, with 
the fresh memory of a terrific war, which seemed to 
be waged by the Almighty for the purpose of 
equalizing the conditions of men, we should not, at 
the end of this year of sovereignty, scrutinize the 
condition of the people. 

With the blackened walls of France before us, we 
ought not to shut our eyes to the fact that a 



14 JULY 4, 1871. 

widening gulf of discontent and inequality is sepa- 
rating two armed classes in this republic which is 
founded on equality. Every one knows that the 
incomes of the very rich are becoming more enor- 
mous, while the number of those who have no surplus 
to save is ■ steadily increasing. While masses are 
becoming more ready to be purchased, individuals 
are becoming more able to purchase them. Thus, 
luxury and mercenary bands, for civil wars, grow 
up together. Under this inequality, labor and 
capital are becoming mutually defiant. The theory 
that the laborer is to be kept in his jplace is now 
meeting another, that capital has no right which 
labor is bound to respect. The fact is patent that 
capital is not less selfish than ever, and that labor 
is becoming generally dishonest in quantity and 
quality. The battle-field and the battle-cries are 
as old as civilization. Capital, forgetting that 
organizations now give a corporate power to labor- 
strikes, and still hoping to win its invariable victory, 
calls him who announces the disease and suggests 
a cure — incendiary. 

But never before in the history of nations were 
both parties to this social combat equally armed 
with vote and bayonet. The revolution, by intro- 
ducing the element of equality, complicated the 
problem. The war of the rebellion enlarged that 



ORATION. 15 

element. We have given to labor suffrage and 
arms ! Henceforth, men, without property or 
character, may make and unmake kings. 

The protection of four things — life, liberty, 
property, and character — was formerly supposed 
to be the end of government and laws. American 
theories of suffrage give all the powers of legislation 
over four interests to men who may have only two 
of them, — liberty and life. 

"When discontent as to the distribution of property 
takes general possession of a class of armed men 
who have the power of voting upon interests which 
they covet and do not possess, mobs — the great 
peril of a republic — may be expected. To hide 
one's eyes from the peril does not avert it. 
Protection, not concealment, is now demanded. 
Protection must be sought and can be found in the 
conservative character and interests of the armed 
majority. The problem is how to make the armed 
majority conservative. 

Whenever the standard of value has been changed, 
such discontents as the present have arisen. At 
such epochs the luxury of the rich has kept pace 
with the poverty of the poor. The history of the 
change is simple. 

In a studio at Florence, twenty years ago, a 
sculptor was shaping a mass of clay. From his 



16 JULY 4, 1871. 

artistic fingers grew the figure of a seductive 
woman, emptying at her feet a cornucopia of gold, 
while from the muscular grasp of her right hand, 
which was concealed behind her, depended a scourge 
of thorns. It was the statue of California. 

Two or three years later, Chevalier predicted the 
form of inequality and discontent which now disturbs 
the relations of capital and labor in the United 
States. As a student of social science, he knew 
that the sudden and extraordinary augmentation of 
gold would most disastrously affect regular salaries, 
which are not easily increased, and those commodi- 
ties which cannot be kept over for a better market. 
Labor, especially, is a perishable commodity. The 
miner and the needle-woman cannot let the sun go 
down on an unsold day. To-day cannot be stored 
up till to-morrow. Starvation, unaided from with- 
out, can make no terms. It is more helpless 
before the employer than is the borrower before the 
money-lender. Labor-organizations grow out of 
this utter helplessness. Only by the combination 
of the employed and unemployed can half-paid 
labor wait for a better market. 

The influx of gold has lengthened the yard-stick 
by which we measure values. Paper currency has 
increased such inflation. But even if we were to 
resume specie payments to-morrow, we have perma- 



ORATION. 17 

nently entered on an era of higher prices. If it 
were not for labor-saving machinery, and the open- 
ing of some new fields of commerce and production, 
we should find an increase in the price of every 
article of general consumption as measured by the 
standard, gold. Provisions, land in localities not 
still asleep, house-rents, boarding and lodging have 
trebled in price. Generally, except in house-service, 
which is both largely paid and free from the 
anxieties of self-support, wages have only doubled. 
The rise of wages has not kept pace with the rise of 
prices paid by the poor, or with the profits of 
capital. 

Our homilists, who decry luxury among the work- 
ing-classes, forget that their luxury, their comforta- 
ble homes, their pretty tea-service, their beautiful 
chromos on the wall, are the measure of the safety 
and conservative well-being of the republic. Such 
are the conditions of the conservative armed 
majority. 

We have a proverb, " Be virtuous, and you will be 
happy," to which some philosopher, with a grim 
sense of humor, has added the words, "but you 
will not have a very good time." The older civiliza- 
tion of the Chinese has more profoundly sounded 
the truth of miserable human nature. " Be happy, 
and you will be virtuous," say the disciples of Con- 



18 JULY 4, 1871. 

fucius. Discontent and a republic, founded on 
equality, cannot dwell together. The sentiments of 
an incendiary swell his heart who dreads to look 
upon his children because the wolf is at the door. 

More money, rather than more unemployed time 
to agonize over the want of it, is the cure for the 
heart-burning of the poor. Men are so unwilling to 
be taxed directly, and take so kindly to indirect 
extortion, that the real demand, " more wages " for a 
certain measure of work, assumes the less offensive, 
more plausible form, w a smaller measure of work for 
the money." Labor, following the example of the 
trader, is trying to substitute the wine quart for the 
beer quart ; and, failing of this, everywhere offers an 
adulterated or diluted article. Eight hours are not 
the remedy for the labor-murrain that infects the 
country. For no rule of contentment is more per- 
fect than this, — "A little more money than one 
wants, and a little less time than one needs." Con- 
tentment, honesty, and chastity are suffering, not 
for want of time to be chaste, honest, and contented, 
but because labor has not yet felt its just proportion 
of the impetus that the change of the standard has 
given to values. 

A host of anxious women is taking the place of 
the happy mothers of the people. Enforced misery 
of miseries is vitiating the republic at its very source 



ORATION. 19 

of life. A mob of dishonest, discontented men, 
armed with vote and musket, crowd the steps, and 
press upon the throne that our fathers established. 
These men must be converted or repelled. 

Precepts and exhortations will not avail. We 
may preach charity till we faint. Even the great 
charter of our liberties, the Federal Constitution, is 
only a bundle of inoperative, but excellent principles. 
We give them effect by legislation. Society is only 
held together by statutes. Life and virtue should 
be protected -against the slow approaches of neces- 
sity, as well as against the more sudden assault. 
The degradation of the future mothers of the 
people is a horror so monstrous, that, as the wages 
of a sailor cling to the last plank of a ship, the 
salvation of women ought to be made the first 
duty of the State. Either we should provide 
employment for women, at sufficient compensa-r 
tion, so that they can be fit, pure mothers of the 
people; or we should drown the female children, 
as they do in China which orginates the proverb, 
w Be happy, and you will be virtuous." God knows 
it would be less cruel. 

I hear the angry cry of those who think that 
virtue and vice, and happiness and misery should 
be left to the natural laws of demand and supply: 
"Manufacturers will be ruined, if wages are to be 



20 JULY 4, 1871. 

increased." Perhaps they may be; and capital may 
have to seek more lucrative occupation, as labor is 
advised to do, under the natural laws of demand 
and supply. But something must be done to 
remedy a fatal disease of the republic. The exhor- 
tations of charity are unavailing. But the State, — 
God bless her! — has the power of enforcing charity 
by taxation. The citizens are taxed for public 
schools, to prevent ignorance. Why should they not 
be taxed for public factories, to prevent theft and 
prostitution? The State and the poor may well be 
partners in a grand co-operative system. Why 
should not the government, which has factories of 
ships and cannon, establish factories to create the 
cheap defence of nations? The expense of police, of 
penitentiaries, of civil wars, of a republic lost, is a 
more serious item than the whole cost of State 
normal factories. The protection of feeble girls, of 
broken-down women, the comfortable and virtuous 
rearing of the mothers of the people, is founded on 
the bare, selfish, common sense that makes the 
farmer house his ewes from winter storms, and save 
his heifers from the plough. The co-operative 
system should be initiated by legislative charity 
based on the power of inexhaustible taxation. The 
taxes of civil war are heavier. It is better for the 
State to weave cotton at a loss than to make the 



ORATION. \ 21 

social warp and woof so rotten that luxury and 
misery, tugging at the republic, can rend it. It is 
better for the rich to eat into accumulated capital 
than for the poor, the armed majority, to become 
Catilines in the fever of accumulating debt. We 
must make the laborer conservative, or reduce him 
to a very low, servile, defenceless state, which Cal- 
houn thought essential to the condition of service in 
a republic of equals. A commission to prepare a 
tabular statement of the purchasing power of gold, 
as compared with a period twenty years ago, would 
confer signal service on the country. It would 
demonstrate the justice or injustice of the present 
discontent. 

The failure hitherto to adjust all compensations to 
the new value of gold seriously affects the power of 
the sovereign people to employ its ablest servants. 
In !New England the salaries of judges have so 
much declined in relative value, that only the highest 
sense of public duty retains in a vital service men 
who, by practice in their own courts, might secure 
thrice the sum of their judicial salaries. This is 
certainly burning the candle of economy at both 
ends, which was not Franklin's intention. 

The salutary competition that an increase of sala- 
ries would create is intimately connected with a most 
desirable reform, — abolition of all unpaid offices. A 



22 JULY 4, 1871. 

housekeeper would be deemed insane who, unless he 
should load all his pistols and lock up his spoons, 
should pay those servants, who were interested in 
the disbursement of his money, no wages. Yet this 
grave folly our monarch, The People, is constantly 
committing. I need make no apology for alluding 
to this pernicious error, in the presence of a city 
government chosen, in a manner most honorable to 
itself and its respected chief, by a revolutionary 
uprising of all parties against abuses which time 
and quiescence had sanctioned as the perquisites of 
patriotism. "We know that every year crowds the 
trades and professions with honest, able and anxious 
men, who would become candidates for public office 
if it offered legitimate and adequate support. The 
public would be better served by servants whom it 
could reprimand for malfeasance, than it ought to 
be by volunteers who sacrifice their own interests to 
public spirit. 

Intimately connected also with the abolition Of 
unpaid public offices which cost the nation enormous 
sums of waste, is the duty of a citizen to accept 
adequately paid office and vote at elections. The 
People, like any other monarch, is entitled to the 
service of its subjects. That tenure of lands, which 
under monarchies depends on some trifling annual 
service to the king, is based on this principle of con- 



ORATION. 23 

stant duty. But the lord would uot hold the ewer 
or buckle ou the spur, unless some forfeiture should 
attend his nonfeasance. Precepts, without laws and 
penalties, will not secure anxious allegiance. 

American as I am, in every fibre of my heart, I 
find the secret of national power in another land than 
my own. If I should ask the question, where purity 
of life, frugal simplicity of habits, intellectual cul- 
ture, patriotic fire, and all male virtues predominate; 
where the most affectionate domestic ties combine 
the larger, grander love for Fatherland ; where the 
interests of armed millions are welded into the 
mighty wedge of one iron will ; where we hear that 
majestic tread of humanity, with a great purpose 
before it and a great nation behind it, — the voice of 
even an American assembly would correctly reply. 
And why do we find this- simple virtue, this earnest 
republican energy, under the shadow of the Prussian 
throne ? Is it the form of government that makes 
Prussia the power that she is ? 

Let France — let Paris, — 

"Unhappy Paris, but to women brave," — 

whose daily bulletins sound like a chapter from 
Ezekiel, reply. 

Compulsory legislation, based on a scheme of 
national greatness, devised long ago, has made the 



24 JULY 4, 1871. 

Prussian a dutiful citizen. The want of such legis- 
lation has changed the beauty of France to ashes. 
The absence of such legislation here, under our false 
theories of the consent of the governed, of the sanc- 
tity of an enlightened American elector, and that 
liberty requires a weak executive expression of an 
armed nation's will, has degraded American politics 
and office so low, that, except in moments of peril, 
when God comes down among the people with pen- 
tecostal flame, inspiring them to think in thoughts 
and speak in tongues which they did not know, many 
able and honest men of iron, who would serve the 
people as loyally as they would serve the omniscient 
Lord of Hosts, will have nothing to do with public 
affairs. 

As the legislation of Prussia, with intent to 
create an invincible army of citizens, has compelled 
every man to be a trained soldier; as there, no 
learning, wealth, or refinement exempts gentle or 
noble from military service; as there, no sluggish- 
ness of the well-conditioned, no selfishness of 
private business, no sneers of caste, which are often 
the tremors of cowardice, are permitted to detain 
one vitalizing drop of blood from the national heart 
and arm; as there, in the transcendent Prussia of to- 
day, the worthy may never devolve their muskets on 
the base, — so we, who think the ballot supersedes 



ORATION. 25 

the bayonet, and would not see it turned against 
society by the vicious, improvident, and dangerous 
classes who have no interest of property or char- 
acter to protect, should, under the severest pains 
and penalties, compel every citizen to vote. 
Election days should be the roll-call of the nation, 
as they were at the election of the Magyar 
Kings, when a hundred thousand sword-points 
flashed to heaven, and a hundred thousand bearded 
throats thundered " I will ! " 

The citizen has no more right to withhold his 
unit, from the sum of law and order, than has the 
soldier to desert a field where his musket may 
decide the combat. If we are a government, the 
governing power must not desert itself. 

To counteract the much-lauded, but undoubted 
and irrevocable evil of unqualified suffrage, the 
support of the republic by the most educated, 
refined, opulent and influential citizens is to be 
especially desired. The machinery to compel their 
attendance is simple. The absence of a checking 
mark against a name, after the polls were closed, 
would be prima facie evidence of delinquency, 
subject of course to rebutting testimony. A fine, 
based on some percentage of the delinquent's next 
tax-bill, to be added thereto and collected with the 
tax, would insure the anxious attendance of the 



26 JULY i, 1871. 

largest holders in the great joint-stock concern, — 
society. Non-voting, contemptuous grumblers 
would become earnest debaters at primary meet- 
ings. Nominees, who are not party hacks, would 
come before the people. For between high-headed 
contempt for all parties, and compelled action in 
support of either, there is a wide difference. The 
rich candidates for office are not necessarily more 
corrupt than the poor, and the pockets able to tempt 
the rich by a sufficient bribe are comparatively few. 
The fancy that all nominees must be well known 
to the electors is dissipated by a single fact. The 
most and least intelligent blindly follow a ballot born 
of rank corruption. 

By making the exercise of suffrage compulsory, 
we should learn how many of our fair sisters de- 
sire to be forced to do an act, which, if not backed 
by armed force, is only a tender appeal to the courtesy 
of law-breakers. In a composite government like 
ours an illusory manifestation of popular will may 
involve a State in impotent hostility to other States, 
or to the Federal authority. Washington, the sol- 
dier, intended to found a strong government. Con- 
tempt for shams and blank cartridge lies at the 
base of power. 

However just it may be that women with property 
should be allowed a voice in making the laws; how- 



ORATION. v 27 

ever true it may be that some male voters are an 
exception to the general rule of bearing arms ; how- 
ever difficult it may be for the sexes so to arrange 
their union that almost every child-bearing woman 
shall merge her life in the protection of her intended 
mate, some arm-bearing man, and make with him 
one political individual, — there would seem to be 
no safety to society in impotent suffrage, and no 
profit in amvying the women of one section against 
the women of another — except to the milliners. The 
loftiest sigh of aspiration, the purest ballot, would 
not have deterred Jefferson Davis from his mad 
career. That politician is unworthy who can be 
made, by a gentle, white-gloved pressure, or a smile, 
to surrender from the gauntleted hand of strength 
the iron sceptre of a universally-voting and arm- 
bearing nation, until those sweet millennial days 
when every woman is a shepherdess and every man 
— a sheep. What would Miles Standish have 
thought of it? 

If I could, by earnest prayer upon my knees, per- 
suade this nation to make one law, that law should 
compel every able-bodied American to devote the 
first 3^ear of his manhood to the exclusive, vigorous, 
military discipline of a formal Camp. The want of 
the mental and moral habit of implicit obedience to 
authority is the licentious American deficiency. 



28 JULY 4, 1871. 

Irreverence is the vulgar American vice. And 
vulgar vice is so rapid in its generalizations, that 
contempt for one commandment soon dethrones the 
decalogue. The world expresses surprise that our 
returning soldiers are generally law-abiding, gently- 
mannered citizens. But service in a good regiment 
is a liberal education in all the brave, grand, loyal 
principles of duty. The soldier learns to obey, and 
to enforce authority, because he finds subordination 
to be the necessary part of every link in an endless 
chain of power. 

A year of such iron discipline, in a normal camp, 
as the Prussian citizen cheerfully and patriotically 
undergoes, would teach the American citizen some- 
thing of the majesty of the people, as the law-mak- 
ing power. Connivance at a breach of law is as 
insulting to the offended authority as is association 
with an officer under arrest. The degradation of 
the public mind in this regard curiously appears in 
the fact, that while we arrest the mere spectators at 
a gaming-table, as parties to an offence, we 
permit every citizen with impunity to tempt, by 
money and frenzied prayers, the illicit vendor 
of liquor to break the law. 

It is not surprising, with such loose notions about 
mutual responsibility for participation in a breach 
of statute law, that the temperance question 



ORATION. 29 

should be unprofitably hustled about by two bodies 
of reformers ; one of which, permitting all men 
to patronize and tempt, would only punish the 
tempted vendor ; and the other of which would 
dam the ever-flowing cataract of human appe- 
tite, without leaving the smallest sluiceway for the 
waters. The People, as a law-making, law-enforcing 
power, is not yet sensible of its own sacred majesty. 

Nor will it be a sacred sovereign power in the 
sense that our fathers intended, until the voting 
armed majority shall be invested with the interests 
of property and character as well as with life and 
liberty; this contented and virtuous majority elect- 
ing and supporting fully paid officials; these officials 
enforcing the will of the people by the aid of a very 
highly paid police, who, being freed from political 
obligation to any unpaid servants of the public, see, 
hear, remember, and report. 

The first century of our national experiment is 
nearly closed. Society, so prosperous in many 
ways, is filled with the discontented. Some of 
these are war-worn men, whose very quietness of 
manner is formidable because it indicates the subor- 
dination of weak individual impulse to the irre- 
sistible movement in mass. These men, without 
alliances of family or home, because they are too 
poor to contract them, are bound to other men, 



30 JULY 4, 1871. 

stern as themselves, by ties of years and battle 
blood, which is thicker than water. Their hearts 
throb with memories of personal valor which thrill 
the workshops and the fields. Constitutions are as 
weak as withes before the throes of Agonistes in his 
discontent. As a conservative power, these men 
have saved the life of the nation. As a destructive 
element, they can imperil it. Make them conservative 
by a just division of profits, or by the necessary legis- 
lation to start them in co-operative partnerships. 

Let the State in its own factories raise wages 
to the just point, where, if the capitalist can comfort- 
ably live, a poorer republican citizen can live in com- 
fort and hope also. Compel these men to be honest 
in their labor as an equivalent for justice and honesty 
in wages. These soldiers will obey the law. Use 
their equality against the discontent of the vicious 
and improvident when the evil day shall come. The 
national glory is a common bond of sympathy. 
The flag is not more loved and honored in the high 
street where trumpets sound, than in dark lanes 
where some anxious daughter of the people — too 
poor to leave her needle even for an hour — gives a 
glance of tearful triumph at her treasures to-day, — 
the flaxen lock of her patriot son, and the coat with 
its once crimson stain, — her beloved Keel, White, and 
Blue. 



OEATIOX. 31 

A strong government founded on consent is pos- 
sible, if we are practically, unselfishly grateful for 
the Declaration of Independence. The life of the 
immortal words, uttered on the field of Gettysburg 
with the inspiration of Isaiah, is their glow of con- 
secration. Only in this spirit of consecration, by 
yielding some portion of our individual liberty and 
prosperity to the necessity of making the armed and 
voting mass conservative, can we approach the Ideal 
Republic, the ultimate government of the world, the 
strongest government out of Heaven, — that highest 
social organism of virtue, wisdom, and power, the 
type and image of God himself, — law-enacting, 
law-obeying, consentient mankind. 



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